The Figure 8

Amy Pleasant

J. Parker Valentine

Slippage, flux, and change are the tenets of The Figure 8, an exhibition that featured three female artists who explore, through a variety of media, the multitude of ways that these principles might be expressed. Most markedly, Elizabeth Jaeger, Amy Pleasant, and J.Parker Valentine engage simultaneously the figurative associations of the body and abstraction articulated by line and color. The works’ capacity to shift back and forth from the abstract to the physical creates a deeper meditation on the body, on subjectivity, and on how we construct narratives. Like the nominal figure 8, an agreed upon numeral abstraction that also looks similar to a schematic rendering of a person, the works in the exhibition present us with a series of symbols and associations, representations of both ways.